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Insights, quotes, and prompts

Mindletter holds 3 types of small writing.

An insight is something you learned — usually the hard way. One sentence, in your own voice. “Don’t optimize for salary in your twenties. Optimize for learning.” Insights age well because they’re earned.

A quote is something someone else said that struck you. “People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou. How often have you read and lost thoughtful quotes?

A prompt is a question you want to keep returning to. “What would I do if I weren’t afraid?” Just as you evolve, your answers to prompts will evolve as well. Revisit them.

Who can see an insight

When you save something, you choose who it’s for. You can change this later on any insight.

Secret — only you, ever. The text is encrypted on your device with a passphrase before it leaves your phone, so even we can’t read it. Secret insights can’t be shared to a circle or included in your weekly Mindletter emails — they’re for the things meant for your eyes alone.

Because the text is encrypted in our database too, search can’t look inside secure insights. To find one, set the visibility filter to Secret to show only those, then use your browser’s built-in find (⌘F / Ctrl F) to search the unlocked text on the page.

Private — the default. The insight stays with you, and you can also share it to one or more of your circles so the people you’ve chosen see it in their letters. Nothing private is ever public.

Public — anyone can see it. Public insights can appear on your public profile and be discovered by people outside your circles. Use this for the things you’d happily say out loud to a stranger.

What is a Mindletter

A Mindletter is the email you get from yourself, every Sunday.

It contains a handful of things you’ve saved, beautifully curated together. Read and remember naturally what you’ve wrote without effort.

Mindletter is the systemized answer to your messy notes and failed habits.

Resurfacing: why your old insights come back

Most of what we learn, we forget. Not because it didn’t matter — because nothing ever asked us about it again.

Resurfacing is Mindletter’s quiet trick. Every week, alongside what you just wrote, the letter brings back something older: a lesson from six months ago, a quote you saved last spring, a prompt you set aside. It’s not a quiz. It’s not a “memory” in the social-network sense. It’s your own handwriting, handed back at the right distance.

A few things happen when an insight resurfaces:

• You realize you already knew this — and forgot.
• You realize you’ve outgrown it. (Edit it, or let it go.)
• You realize you’ve been needing exactly this, this week.

Forgetting is the default. Resurfacing is the habit that makes your insights stick.

Curious why this works? Read the science behind Mindletter →

Capture from the Action Button

If you have an iPhone with an Action Button (15 Pro, 16, 16 Pro, 16e), you can press it, speak a thought, and Mindletter saves it for you — tightened up a little, but in your words.

Set it up once in the Shortcuts app:

1. Open Shortcuts and create a new shortcut. Name it “Mindletter capture.”
2. Add a Dictate Text action. Leave the language on “Device’s language.”
3. Add a URL Encode action and point it at the Dictated Text variable.
4. Add a Text action with the value https://www.mindletter.com/capture?mode=actionButton&text= followed by the URL Encoded Text variable.
5. Add an Open URLs action pointing at that Text variable.
6. Open Settings → Action Button → Shortcut and pick “Mindletter capture.”

From then on: press the Action Button, speak, glance at the screen — and the entry lands on your home page a moment later.

If you want to edit before it saves, tap the text while you can see it. That hands the draft back to you.

If you happen to be signed out when you press the button, your words are held safely — sign in and we’ll save them right after.

On any phone, you can also tap the mic in the capture toolbar to dictate inside the app.